media volume

Today marks the 7th day that Android P's first developer preview has been available. In the time since, we've spent countless hours digging through P on our phones, decorticating every feature, and checking every tip about small and large changes alike. Our full list of P features has now surpassed 50 items and we've rounded them up with a quick description in case you don't want to spend hours reading each one (though we encourage you to). The main takeaway from P so far is the new focus on privacy and security, the addition of support for new hardware features (notches, dual cams), along with small but overdue changes that refine the Android experience.

Slightly over a week ago, XKCD posted a comic highlighting Android's volume problem. Mainly that trying to turn down the media volume before media playback starts usually results in the ringer volume being changed instead. But as the old saying goes, "there's an app for that," and the app for this is VolumeSync.

Many of you have probably seen yesterday's XKCD comic about the laughably terrible state of volume controls on mobile devices. The issue is particularly bad in Android apps, and developers really need to do something about it. Quite honestly, it's embarrassing that this is still a problem in 2017.

As I'm sure many of you know, Android has three distinct 'volumes' - one for media, one for the ringer, and one for alarms. Each has its own volume level, but unless you're playing media, adjusting the volume just changes the ringer - leading to the problem XKCD nailed in today's comic.